Microsoft huddles with university researchers

Microsoft Research this week is holding its Faculty Summit, attended by hundreds of top researchers from universities and other institutions around the world. The annual confab in Redmond sets the tone and agenda for the company’s work with those researchers.

So far this morning, the main topics of discussion are the huge increase in data to analyze, the rise of social media and technology, and the related security and privacy issues.

Notes from the opening session:

Using digital clickers in the audience, Microsoft conducted a series of real-time polls. Some of the questions demonstrated a gap between the researchers in the audience and the younger generations whose lives their research may ultimately affect. When a question was posed about usage of text messaging, for example, one person in the room asked if e-mail counted. No, explained Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid, who acknowledged that he had never sent a text message himself. Most respondents said they sent fewer than 10 per week. A smaller portion said they sent large numbers.

“Wow, you must have a lot of much younger friends,” Rashid said.

Daniel Reed of Microsoft Research discussed the explosion of available data: “I sometimes tell students that it won’t be very long before an afternoon homework assignment is try to extract insight from 300 terabytes of data. That scale has a whole bunch of practical issues related to security, but resilience, because a large fraction of our cultural and intellectual knowledge base actually resides in a fairly small set of distributed, to be sure, but managed infrastructures.”

Edward Felten, a Princeton University computer-science professor, discussed the implications of the trend: “There was a time, maybe, when you held your own data. Then a period where you would entrust your data to some third party. Now your data is in Company A’s service, which is stored in Company B’s data center. And a lot of the rules about this, traditionally, especially in the law, are driven by who has physical custody of the information. Now, when you have so many different parties involved in where your data is, you don’t even know where. … I think that the technology is really racing ahead of the law and the rulemaking in this area.”

At the same time, younger generations in general may not be as sensitive to security and privacy issues. Elizabeth Lawley, director of the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said her students aren’t concerned, for example, about someone snooping on IM conversations. “They are completely convinced that security through obscurity is sufficient for them,” she said. “They are totally unwilling to believe that anybody would care about what they are doing. … They don’t yet have a sense for how easily data mining can extract the things that they might have said at one point.”

Tony Hey, the Microsoft Research executive in charge of its External Research Division, announced a new set of tools for university researchers, including a “Microsoft e-Journal” service that they can use to share their journal articles and conference proceedings.

He also outlined the current areas of focus for the External Research unit, which oversees Microsoft’s collaboration with outside researchers: Core computer science; earth, energy and environment; education and scholarly communications; and health and well-being.